


The Room Before The Wall

by Zietegeest



Category: Dirk Gently's Holistic Detective Agency (TV 2016)
Genre: Child Abuse, Flashbacks, Hallucinations, Horror, M/M, Physical Abuse, Project Blackwing (Dirk Gently), Psychological Trauma, Sensory Deprivation, Violence
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-10-23
Updated: 2020-10-23
Packaged: 2021-03-08 19:01:30
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 6,536
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/27121507
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Zietegeest/pseuds/Zietegeest
Summary: Todd can feel Dirk flanking him, pressing in as tightly as he can without touching. Todd can see them, as if from above, approach the doorframe - too narrow for them both. Todd angles his shoulders, sees himself angling them, turning them flat and sideways in a strangely unconscious, dreamlike motion.The catch of a bass drum in his ribcage, and Todd is aware of a coldness to his right side. An empty prickling feeling against the expanse of the unfamiliar room. It’s an unmistakable and hollow feeling that tells him Dirk is no longer next to him. He doesn’t have to turn and look, but he does, and the empty wall beside him seems to grin back, just as hollow.
Comments: 7
Kudos: 8





	The Room Before The Wall

**Author's Note:**

  * Inspired by [Pretty Much Destroyed](https://archiveofourown.org/works/24952444) by [Zietegeest](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Zietegeest/pseuds/Zietegeest). 



> This is an accompany piece to Pretty Much Destroyed (65k)  
> *If you haven't read PMD and would like to, please note that this piece contains SPOILERS*  
> What happened to Dirk during chapters 7/8 after their separation into the red room.  
> This was a clipped piece of outline that I scrapped after deciding what narration route to take

_The next room comes around the corner to greet them, all red and waiting…_

The pressure at Dirk’s back and shoulders from the doorframe is gone, and so is the bleeding warmth from the body across from him, and he finds himself alone in a low bare room. 

“Todd?” It leaves his mouth and slams back into his ears, like his anatomy has contorted along with the house, and pushed his vocal cords to either side of his head. He can feel the sound escape him, pounding out alongside the red light. The light that’s blaring just as loudly, from where the ceiling should be, except the ceiling suddenly isn’t where it should be either - it seems several stories higher, the light not even _light_ at all but some thick presence where the flat top of the room was supposed to be. 

_“Todd!”_ He shouts it this time, the name a curling rope across his tongue. Like a coiling river, and it echoes against the misshapen interior of the room, rattling against the walls and swiftly changing course with each encounter. 

Then the echo changes too, becoming some other word, some other name that Dirk can’t hear so much as he feels it - feels it drop down from the high up red glow encasing the four walls around him, feels it wrap around him like unseen tendrils, feels it start to squeeze. 

He tries to spin around now - there’s space to allow it, he knows he passed through that doorframe, though can’t pinpoint when or how it happened. The room encircles him like a mistake. A rational and quaking panicked part of him starts up, stammering inside his head saying _just need to turn around, just need to retrace -_

He manages to turn, eyes collapsing to the floor to find the ghosts of his footsteps - Todd’s beside them too - and the patch of floorboard where the yellow bird had been. He can see it in his mind - how the wings flared out against the grain, beckoning him further and further still, distorting along with the room and his state of being until it’s not a bird but a white rabbit, a golden bricked path, a red string that had led him into this place now. 

But the bird is gone from the floor now - there’s no colour at all aside from the pulsing red, and even that is changing, lifting, spiralling away into the skyscraper of a ceiling. 

The bird doesn’t _feel_ gone though. Despite it’s absence from the floor Dirk can still feel it, wings beating inside his chest. He’s swept under the notion then, that there never was a bird on the floor. That the yellow paint had spilled from him instead, from that sick part inside his head that keeps insisting he go forwards - on to the next. The next city, the next neatly combed set of lies, the next set of things to cling to so temporarily. As temporary as the stage that’s set before him now - the changing rooms, the emptiness beside him where a temporary friend had stood and _where is Todd?_ Gone into the next room? Gone back without him? Gone into that endlessly blurring stream of people he had known, had met and left, flown off away from on painted yellow wings, helpless to fight against that _insisting_ in his head, that need to know what’s in the next room. 

And now, a sinking feeling in his stomach, rock solid and twice as heavy. Not a thing insisting now but flatly saying it outright that he’s finally found it - he’s found the last next-room, and he’s standing in it. 

The room then seems to bow outwards like it’s drawing breath - breath that feels stolen from Dirk’s lungs, and he gasps it out as the walls expand.

 _I’ve been waiting for you,_ the walls say. They speak it to his skin, to the way it’s crawling, bubbling with raised hairs and cold sweat. 

“I’ve been waiting,” the voice repeats - out loud this time, or else loud enough inside Dirk’s head that it becomes real, and splatters against those still-expanding walls.

“You’re late,” the voice says, and Dirk can feel his skin tightening now, retreating away from that voice, instantly certain that it hadn’t come from any place inside of him. He wasn’t capable of creating a voice like that - grated low like sanded metal, spoken around rows of teeth.

He tries to back up, though the voice hasn’t come from any direction that he can perceive. He tries to find some traction on the floor - but there’s no paint on the grain, no grain at all now, like the details he thought were there were fading out, turning tail and fleeing from the voice, and that nervous inner compass in his chest frantically telling him to do the same. _Get out of here_ \- and he’s never felt the need to follow an urge quite so strongly. 

_Where is Todd? And where’s the_ door? _Just find Todd and get to the door, then we can get out. Just find Todd -_ Dirk can feel the thoughts skipping, buffering, looping through his head. Scratching like a needle that’s run out of space, condensing and repeating until it’s just a beat in sync with his pulse, quickening beneath his skin. 

_Todd. Door. Todd. Door._

The only two things in the world that he wants. 

The voice doesn’t care about what he wants, and like smoke shifting past a dark sky a shape materializes against the impassive grey of the breathing walls as it speaks again. 

“Quit stalling and get over here.” The shadows shift against the far wall - the walls shift too, again with that bowing, breathing motion. _Over here_ where the voice was coming from had been a few meters only a moment ago, but now, as Dirk blinks against the sliding grey darkness _over here_ seems further, though pulling closer even as he remains still, rooted in place on the blank floor. 

There’s a pillar of that shifting stuff now, winding upwards and turning hard, turning almost person-shaped, but Dirk can’t make out the details of the figure. Something else is rising from the floor, occupying the wide emptiness between him and the shape against the wall. Something taking form and obscuring his view - though as the red light moans down from the towering space above, he’s less sure that he wants to see that far wall at all. A coldness has latched onto the gnawing pit of his stomach, a needle-sharp prickling along his spine. A recognition that the shake appearing in his hands doesn’t want to hold. 

“Who are you?” Dirk asks, a snapping whip from his tongue, defiant against the rigid pull in his body. His bones feel like rubber in his limbs, unready to run but needing to, already answering his question in a wordless tremble.

“You know who I am,” the voice answers in a drawl. The form in the centre of the room is getting bolder, filling up with intent, squaring off around the edges. Through a gap of those edges Dirk can see for just an instance a knowing glint in an eye-shaped hole looking back at him. 

“We had a scheduled appointment, and you’re late,” the voice continues, moving like a snarl put to a melody, and the walls seem to hum along with it.

“That’s…that’s not true,” Dirk tries to retort, but speech feels stiff and strangely weighted. His chest suddenly feels tight, his joints too, his feet and fingers. His eyes are caught on the strange material still building and appearing, and for a split second he’s almost grateful for the thing, holding his attention and keeping him from looking down at himself. Trying to ease a breath back into his lungs, there’s a fight inside his head, a desire to look down and confirm that he’s been caught in something. Snares around his ankles, ropes around his midsection, constricting his movement, his mind. _Just panic,_ and he tries to focus on that. Just made up, just in my head, and he pulls this out from his own head, pointing at the voice instead.

“That’s a _lie_ and this isn’t happening. This is some kind of trick.” A laugh comes from the wall towards him then, deep and syrup thick. There’s a pressure then, a bright popping in his ears, and the thing in the centre of the room seems to jerk fully into existence. 

The object was the same one that never failed to reveal itself to him any time it caught him slacking. Something that found every crack in his resolve when sleep came slow and hard and wrapped him up to pull him under. Something that insisted too, so adamant to be dwelled on deep into the night, when a domed lid like the hole of a crater would hinge high to eclipse the sky and bury him in the depths of it. 

A large water tank, too large to fit the room as Dirk had entered it. It still looks intrusively large now, even as the walls carry on their retreat. A large stain of shadows casts off in every direction at the base, blueish black and breeding with the falling red light, like maroon ink seeping into the empty space around it, consuming and tainting it. 

Dirk can feel it consuming him too, opening a mouth wide enough to swallow planets whole, and laughing that low and sticking laugh. The curving metal outline of the tank grins down at him, and Dirk can see himself - a white-faced mask, eyes and mouth both open, both painted red from the light and reflected in the tempered glass.

He can feel the presence of the tank, extending out towards him. A thing he finds himself encased within in dreams. Black water soaking his skin and following him into waking, lapping at his sweat and burrowing into the folds of his sheets.

Something he had banished from the realm of his mind and his days, no spoken words or conscious thoughts allowed of it. The distance he had placed between it and the version of himself that held things together, through chasing the high of pretending to play the lead, someone who never met a door he couldn’t open or escape from, someone who saw problems and solved them, found missing things and then a place for them.

And now it sat content inside an impossible room, and stared him down, glass walls and smooth edges boring into the heart of him. The water moving inside, dark and expectant saying _look here,_ and reflecting back a face outlined in terror. _Look here, look at this missing thing._

 _And look at this place for it._

He’s aware of lurching away from the thing, scrambling backwards, tumbling to the ground off to one side. He’s distantly aware that he’s speaking, repeating the last thing he had said, reading it off a backlog with a heavy stutter. 

His eyes feeling stretched from inside his head, like the edges of each eyelid are being peeled away from each other, forced open to stare into the room. It’s neither low nor bare now. A figure stands in front of where he’s fallen, surrounded by an angry glow, running red like neon signs out on the street. Like he’s inside a car going entirely too fast down a wet street, the lights outside streaking the windows and blinding his peripherals. 

“If this isn’t happening then what do you think _is_ happening, Icarus?” 

Dirk flinches at the name - flinches at the way it’s not a name and more like a number. But the name reaches for him, chases his shadow - and hasn’t it always been? - and sinks its teeth in. He can feel the way it’s been practically stitched into his skin, clamped around his ear like a cattle tag, but it’s not as bad as the voice that’s spoken it. Dirk doesn’t want to respond to it, doesn’t want to acknowledge it at all, but a reply is forced out of his mouth before he has the time to shut it.

“I don’t know, Mr. Priest,” and it comes out in a reedy flow, airy and trapped high up in his throat. His chest feels locked up, constricted and unwilling to let any air in. It’s the truth though - dug out of him with that bored brand of ease that the voice always used to get the truth out of him. 

“That doesn’t look very good for you, now does it?” The voice has teeth now and they’re smiling in a thin stretched line. The figure is made of meat now - broad shoulders and a thick stance against the floor. A head that’s staring at him dead on, chin pushed forwards, eyes pointed down to lock onto him.

“I’m getting out of here,” Dirk says, mostly to himself, and rises, takes a backwards lunge away from the predatory gaze. Dirk’s body falls into the motion, but doesn’t turn with any strength, as if he’s moving something that’s lighter than it should be, with less force behind the movement. 

“Where do you think you need to be in such a hurry, now?” It’s a placating voice - another lie - but this wasn’t the house’s trick, this was the voice’s specialized one. It didn’t belong to some room - wooden beams and peeling off-white wallpaper - it was the personalized signature of the man who commanded it. Soothing in it’s slow and methodical approach. Sickly sweet, riddled with applied charm, soothing the way the hypnotic sway of a cobra’s head was soothing. Luring and deceitful in its calm. 

“I - ” and for a moment, caught up in the sway, Dirk finds he’s forgotten what it is he _thinks_ is happening. Had just a moment ago _thought_ it with such conviction that it hadn’t felt like a thought at all - it had felt like a known. One of the secure and definite knowns, as sure as a sunrise, and bigger, bolder. It comes running back to him then, but watered down, like a thought that wasn’t quite his own anymore, rain dirtied by the eavestrough, no good for drinking.

“I’m on a _case,_ ” he says then, and the downpour really starts. He can feel his tongue like lead in his mouth, rapidly drying and his eyes won’t blink, won’t tear away from the man-shaped thing. 

He can still see the way his own face had looked in the mirror of the tank. Can see the way the man is looking down at him, with distasteful boredom that’s just removed from amusement. And a parallel, a flushed contrast from what might have been an hour or a lifetime ago, another face wearing another expression. What was it? Dirk’s head feels swollen with wet thoughts, spinning out and becoming stained and dirty. 

But then _there,_ it comes back to him.

The strange way Todd had looked at him - had run his eyes over Dirk’s face with a concern that was not fabricated with some other, deeper motive. Raw concern, widespread alarm - alarm because he was slipping off someplace alone again, was cracking, hell, was already cracked, but that didn’t matter - he’s almost able to shake this off now, because what mattered was _Todd,_ not how he looked at him but _that_ he had looked at him - had looked at him because he had been there, had been _right there beside him,_ just a moment ago - 

“I’m investigating this place with my friend,” Dirk says, gaining confidence in the thought - it’s not a thought it’s a _known,_ an unshakable constant - “someone else is waiting just outside and I’m getting out of here.”

“Enough of this, Icarus.” The drawl is not so soothing now, a tense sigh of an undercurrent and it licks at their exchange. It’s pulling them away from the line of shore, closer towards new depths. Dirk watches as his posture changes, shifting weight from one foot to the other and crossing his arms loosely against the forward push of his chest in an irritated gesture. 

This new gesture - subtle and deceitfully relaxed - stops any further argument that Dirk had forming.

Because irritated wasn’t good, was a few steps closer to angry, and angry wasn’t good at all, angry meant that honey tone was going to shift, was going to rise like a drawbridge and clam up, to stomp out the notion of anything playful. Because behind that charm and sway was just a weapon dressed up like a man, just the striking bite, and the pattern and casing didn’t mean a thing. 

Dirk’s constant is shaking now. Small cracks forming in the foundation, bits of rubble wriggling their way out from the core of it, tumbling down to join the dust on the floor -

Dirk looks down then, spinning on his heels as he traces his body in a circle - the light is playing tricks now and he looks small between the walls - there is no dust on the ground. The aged floorboards are gone entirely - replaced now with a smooth, flat and garishly plain grey stretch of flooring. No grooves between tiles, just one expanse of sameness. Raising his head back up in a panic Dirk finds that the walls have flickered, changing to mimic the floor. A low, lurching pang hits his chest with a stifling force as he realizes the door is gone too - the door he had entered through, had entered through with Todd. Todd who’s vanished too - his best hope at leaving this lie with its changing walls and placating tone - vanished with him. 

“I’m on a case with my friends and I really must be leaving now,” Dirk says, sidestepping away from the voice now, backing up with the blind hope that if he just retraces the way he came he’ll be transported back into that room - hell, even that hallway.

“Enough of cases, - _friends - “_ and this word he spits out with such venomous disdain that Dirk can clearly see the sway, the teeth, the coiling rings, the tension before the strike. What he can’t see anymore is the known - the constant is being washed away, down into the gutter, soaked into the earth and the soil draws it in so eagerly - and it’s been so dusty, so dry, so long since there’s been anything at all to drink from - 

“You’re not real and this isn’t happening,” Dirk spits out, turning back around to face him, balking as he sees the man has advanced on him, that he’s now basking in the red light, face lit up in awful shadows, but Dirk stiffens his back, keeps talking, “…and you can’t talk to me like - ”

The man cocks an arm back without effort or grace and his knuckles catch under Dirk’s jaw. The bolt of pain that jerks up to the cap of his skull is immediately nauseating, folding his body like a car wreck. 

“Don’t back talk me, now, I ain’t in the mood for the squabbling.” The words fade in and out of Dirk’s ears - ringing now - as he tries to regain his balance, the lurch of his stomach is gripping, commanding his posture and it’s a fight not to double over again. 

“Think I want to be spending my time babysitting?” The words are spat out like they’ve been chewed on for a while, all fat and gristle.

“Just get in and get this over with,” and Dirk doesn’t fully understand this, though some part of him seems to - he can feel it in the recesses of his body, feel the clench and cold drop in his gut, a numbness at the edges. 

“Getting _out_ of here,” Dirk repeats, feeling the shadow of the man’s fist on his face, distorting his words. He can feel the blood singing beneath his skin, agitated flesh preparing to bruise, and the tense promise in the air of another strike coming from him. He shifts backwards away from the swing, trying to run but so off balance, like his body is unable to fully respond to what he’s asking of it. 

Both the words and the dodge were the wrong thing, and the brow of the other man-shaped thing lowers. He takes another stride forward - this is it, this is well past irritated, this is _pissed off_ one beat away from angry, one beat away from that quick exhale, that _smile_ and that mad dog let off leash - 

And he reaches through the air, cuffs a fist around the front of Dirk’s shirt and lifts him off his feet. 

At first, as gravity drops out beneath him, Dirk thinks that it’s the blow to his head making him misinterpret something, or the strange rooms of the house doing things to his mind, because this can’t be what’s happening, can’t be possible. The angle, the motion, the lack of strain on the man’s upper body - it’s all wrong. He’s glowering into Dirk’s eyes, though Dirk’s legs have been pulled up and away from the ground. 

All just another point in Dirk’s favour, another tally in the _can’t be real_ category, the closing statement to his _can’t be happening_ passage and he can feel all of this bubbling up inside, battling against the swelling nausea in him stomach. He’s a breath away from the upper hand, from dismantling this manufactured reality when he looks down at the fist gripping him. 

It’s a hand large enough to cover most of his chest - his chest which has shrunk, become narrow and thin, and he isn’t clothed in what he had entered the house wearing. 

The body the man has hoisted into the air belongs to a child - one not caught in a snare but caught in the jaws of the beast, limp limbed and without any weight to struggle against the hold with any success. 

“Get in the tank, and I won’t hit you again,” Osmund Priest says calmly, the words wafting into Dirk’s face. He’s been drawn close enough that Dirk can see the deep grooves etched into the man’s skin, the deep-set caves of his eyes, startlingly bright amid the shadows, bright like the peppering of scars lining his jaw and temple.

Then gravity is bolting back to life again and Dirk is falling - dropped hard onto the smooth and empty floor. It’s a long fall for the new shape of his body, and he crumples onto it, dismissed by the hands that had picked him off of it so easily. 

“I’m not getting in that thing,” Dirk says when the air returns to his lungs. It’s not the voice he could remember using last, but the tremor skipping through the words is all his own. 

“Not in one piece if you keep this up,” Priest says, and sounds almost sorry, almost with a woeful pang, but then he’s smiling, a crooked sort of half-grin and another column of meat connects with the side of Dirk’s face. 

The force of it nearly returns him to his feet, jerking his frame through the air and he lands hard on one elbow, the point of connection on his jaw turned to a numbness that doesn’t last. 

Dirk can’t feel it so much as he hears it _crunch_ inside his head, something dislodging, and it’s not until he sputters up a thin line of blood that the firework of pain explodes from him. 

He cries out then, a wet open-mouthed sound of shock, expecting a tooth to fall out alongside the noise. It doesn’t though - it still stays connected, though not as securely as it had been seconds ago, and the sharp snare of pain that rockets up from the root crawls off in every direction inside his mouth, down his neck and up into the passages behind his face. 

“Get up,” Priest says next, indifferent to the sound and the blood that’s been sputtered onto the floor. He walks in close, kicks at Dirk’s legs with the toe of one boot, though there’s no real force behind the gesture. Dirk flinches from it anyway, scrambling back onto his feet and then back some more, scanning the walls for an escape from the room. He’s taken another few steps backwards when Priest is reaching out again, smacking the back of his hand once against Dirk’s cheek. It’s just a stinging, warning tap, and Priest is speaking again.

“Quit trying to worm your way out of this, and just get in.” 

“I _won’t,_ ” Dirk says, cringing at the way the words slam into the nerves inside his gums. Priest scowls, his expression clouding over into vacant again, and he reaches towards him not with a fist but with both arms. One hand snakes around, catches beneath Dirk’s arm and squeezes tight. Then the other arm comes in - twisted at the wrist and slamming fast into his collarbone. Dirk doesn’t have time to think as the air is crushed out of him, his head knocking hard against the floor but he hadn’t noticed himself falling, shoes spasming against the floor as he tries to right himself, finds he can’t. 

Then, delayed again, the pain hits. 

He tries to scream but there’s a weight all down his throat and across his chest that won’t let any noise escape. His body won’t lie flat or fully turn over - like something inside has twisted around the wrong way. Every shard of breath is sharpened, scraped out of his chest, and pain becomes the only constant, the only known.

From the floor, through tunnelling, cast out vision Dirk can see the shadow of the man coming towards him. He reaches down, hands folded like in prayer, and they come to splay across Dirk’s chest. There’s a hot gear of pain that’s worse than the rest, then pressure, a soft caving of something inside his chest, and the rest of the pain bubbles down, cooling fast into a below the surface erosion, and he can breathe again. There’s still an ache, like his ribcage has been softens, dissolved somehow, and there’s not enough blood going anywhere fast enough inside to try to run again. 

“Get up,” Priest repeats, and Dirk’s limbs are moving like fish removed from water against the floor. He’s aware in a stretched out part of his mind that if he doesn’t obey, doesn’t at least try to obey that the next bout of pain will be worse, and the one after that will remove him from his mind entirely, casting him out into that two dimensional state and there won’t be any doors in that place either. 

The whole segment by his clavicle that Priest had struck is bleating softly as he tries to rise - trying at the same time to recalculate his position in the room, scanning it for an opening - a crack in the facade that he can crawl through, though by the time he’s regained his off-set balance on the floor there’s nothing to be found. 

A sudden grip on his shoulders spins him with something that would be grace if it came from different hands, and the tank stands back within Dirk’s line of vision. It’s the only thing in his vision now, having come much closer in the time he’s spent on the floor. It’s an amount of time that Dirk can’t find a way to reason with, and with the new and looming closeness of the tank, can’t even attempt. 

Priest is leaning in now from behind him. The rough skin of his face is irritating the hair behind Dirk’s ear, now lips he can feel against the forming mark on his cheek, wet and close to deliver his words.

“Get in the tank, and I won’t hit you again.” 

The gleaming, grinning, salivating walls of the tank stare back at Dirk. Fingers tap against his shoulders - they’re not even holding him in place with muscle anymore, but with gentle promise. The tank stares and the tapping is a cheerful rhythm, counting silently the number of bones in Dirk’s body, the number of long, long minutes in a day, the number of times it’s happened, could happen again, the number of years in a building, of rooms in a house…

☛☛☛☛☛☛☛☛☛☛☛☛☛☛☛

Sinking down into the water required strength and coordination Dirk can’t find within his body. The strain against his muscles - undeveloped and wildly uncertain of themselves - practically grinds against the thick metal of the railing. He can imagine either letting go or simply slipping, wracking his skull against the lip of the tank and going under. Another bolt of tremors pass through his arms - this doesn’t feel like just imagining. Instead it feels fully formed and coiled up inside of him - something that had already happened, something waiting patiently to happen again. 

The air in his lungs contracts then, sticks inside the thin tube of his throat at the sight of the next thought, pressing him towards it. Not imagining, not pretending, or playing some game where he can guess what happens next -

His lungs are sucking in on nothing, arms locked and frozen, forgotten for a moment while it hits him. A glossy memory, thick like vaseline, like vignettes -

_  
Pressure at his shoulders, ripping him like a claw from the quiet of the water into the cruel bite of the flat recycled air of the room. Pressure in his mouth next, the sides of his face as hands pry his jaw open. The taste of plastic next, warped and crawling down his throat, the snag as it passes down, indifferent to the lashing struggle of his tongue, his teeth, the wrenching lurch from his chest. Rejection from his body in a thin and intrusive act of violence. Violence chased with coughs that burn red against his insides._

_The dark water lining the walls of his lungs, his stomach, his mouth is done with him - he’s vomiting water onto the floor now, catching streaky glimpses of steel toed black boots in front of him, uncaring as the regurgitated water outlines their treads. He can see one lining up inside his vision, winding back for the onside kick._

And he’s back above the tank, arms burning as they struggle to hold up his weight, legs tucked tight against body. Back in the room with no doors. Back again, back again, _back home again -_

He nearly cries out when his hands slip against the railing. He wants to say that he can’t do it, but the locked-in silence of the man on the floor won’t let him voice it.

He can see an alternate route stretch long and play out - a version of things where the shadows on the walls would come in with arms that ended in syringes rather than fingers, each gesture a promise of slow awakenings and clouded eyes, legs that won’t go where he tells them. In this route the shadows come forward like machine soldiers. Limbs steel and faces matching, ready to grip him and hold him down, force him into the water themselves. 

So he steels himself in turn - though he’s still more flesh than metal - and the shake in his arms is a full bodied tremble now.

The flat dark line of water beneath him doesn’t part easily when he first breaches its surface. Instead it seems to push back against him, to rear up to meet him, so quiet and eager to receive. 

A voice that feels like his, like some detached mold of himself thinking _it’s not cold, it’s supposed to be cold._

As soon as he thinks it the water turns frigid. Gasping, Dirk yanks his legs back up towards his body, his arms screaming out against the violent motion. From the floor, Priest growls at the lost progress.

“I don’t know what you think you’re waiting for, now _get in,_ ” he’s shouting, and from around and beneath him, Dirk can feel the vibrations through the glass. 

_What am I waiting for?_ Dirk thinks, helpless to the burning feel of his arms, locked out and searing. Again, desperately, _where’s Todd?_ And he can feel the glower of rage from Priest as he thinks it. Priest - inside his head in the way he’s been inside his skin, burrowed deep inside of it, the shadowed thoughts of him growing and squirming like hookworms, botflies, those cysts with teeth and hair. 

“Get into that water now or else I’ll pull that wormy _’friend’_ of yours out to play and start cutting pieces off until you do,” Priest says from the floor. It’s a shouted threat that’s dreamlike, almost lyrical with glee, watching Dirk’s grip struggles against the railing.

A final, desperate surge of thought and heartbeat slams through Dirk, defiant against the voice - _you said that wasn’t real, you said that wasn’t happening…_ It’s enough to hold onto but only with his mind and his hands are slipping, greasy with sweat against the railing and he’s falling soundlessly into the water.

The shock of the water purges everything from his mind. There’s a moment of stillness, still as the glass, wide as the mouth of the tank. Then through the stillness, as the fog encircles his mind, Dirk becomes aware of his muscles, his organs, all locked up inside his body, shocked to silence too by the bottomless pitch of the freezing water.

All too aware of how it feels exactly as he tried not to remember it.

How his mind would paint faces against the glass, hands and mouths and things from the bottom of the tank - but there was no bottom of the tank, no walls, no roof. A flat black hollowness, shapes swimming around him, dancing with the struggle of his body in the dark. Shapes his mind gives life too - draws them eagerly, hungrily onto his mind - wheels off with that wretched imagining, that marvellous game of _what things will we see in the tank today?_ and every conjured up thing becoming real within the water.

 _What will we see today? Will it be Mr. Priest’s head on the neck of an eel? Fins and shadows, hunger in the deep? Will the base of the tank open up? Will it be a cave instead? A mouthful of teeth? Or those hands again - those long, long fingers?_

Spinning, blurring, bleeding thoughts, ready to actualize themselves within the water, thoughts that weight him down as he floats on his back with screams that hurt his ears, echoing through his head long after he’s been lifted back out of the water. But the thoughts don’t end that easily, painting themselves instead on the walls of his room, the soft tissue of his dreams. 

And back again, there it is, that _urge_ that _need,_ that required push inside him _insisting_ that he look, that he stare into the faceless water and see what’s looking back.

He can feel it - feel all of it running back to greet him through the water and the meaningless spool of time, back again, back home again. Back to feel the way his body is ripped away from his mind, feel the way his heart would pound against his ribs, slowing in the cold, speeding up to rupture. A rhythm carried through years of waking dreams, those cold wet hours in the night.

Eyes burning, blurring against the water as Dirk opens them - or tries not to open but, but feels them open anyway. And through the warping of the tempered glass he can see the room around him - but it’s not smooth, not grey, but _grainy_ , plain walls and wooden floorboards, sparse and old, sad like an abandoned house -

An abandoned house, enclosed with a chainlink fence, surround by nothing but dust - 

Dirk’s legs jerk back to life inside the water - _the house, I’m just inside that house_ \- and _fuck, if I can just swim back up I can get out of here!_ It’s a bolt of life back through his veins - some other part of his mind starts rambling about adrenaline, about the spikes of endorphins that kick in before death does, but he can’t listen to it now, has to reach out with his arms inside the water, has to swim, go back to the surface.

But the water doesn’t move like water against his skin, but something thick and viscous, making swimming and even floating useless in an instant. Dirk tries to twist his body around, finds that’s stuck too, thinking in a wild panic that it doesn’t even feel that cold, and then _TODD, WHERE ARE YOU?_

He’s unable to scream it with his mouth - already open to the thick congealing water, already rendered silent. His lungs are filling with it, stomach, veins, all filling with it, but his mind - the threat of it so close to breaking off - shouts it louder than his voice could have if it tried. The echo of it is deafening. It ricochets off his skull, the walls of the tank, a burning, reverberating thrum. 

Eyes eclipsing the edges of the tank, the shadows of the walls, the pulsing shape of the room. They run vacantly upwards, the last call of light against the surface of the water, the outline a blaring red halo around the shape - and it’s not the shape of the room, but something in the room, standing out _against_ the room somehow. The details of it blurred out, lines refusing to obey, but it’s Todd, fierce and there if only in his mind. Conjured up by the delirium of sinking into the water - it’s not water but it’s water enough to drown in - dying surrounded by glass, but that surge, that last stutter of heartbeat too relieved to hold on any longer, thinking _you didn’t leave without me._

Then the red-lined glow around Todd is blinking out, his figure plunging an arm into the water towards him and Dirk reaches back as his eyes fill with the darkness of the water. He wants to reach back with more than his hand, wants to tell him sorry for disappearing, for adding another name to that blurring crowd of people at his back. But there’s no more air left inside - none left to mourn _I never get to say goodbye,_ a smooth stone of clarity as he sinks further. That blurring stream of people keeps blurring like the glass, the water, the voices from the shadows. Todd’s arm keeps carving through the water, reaching for him as he reaches back, but it’s dark now, too dark to see if he’s getting close to that reaching hand, but the water doesn’t feel like water, doesn’t feel cold anymore. 

_I never got to say thank you,_ then Todd’s hand is making contact with his own. Dirk tries to press the words into his skin, even as he feels his mind sinking to the bottom of the tank. He squeezes, desperately trying to convey the swirling, dying light inside his head, burning from his skin. He’s gripping Todd’s hand now, finally, in the final room, the chase over. He keeps trying to press it into Todd’s skin - that it’s too late, but thank you, thank you for everything - as his eyes tune out the tank, the room, the universe, and the lights are going out.

_I never got to tell him -_


End file.
